Clinton did it, too!

Upon being found guilty of perjury, obstruction of justice, and making false statements, Lewis "Scooter" Libby was commuted by President Bush. Right-wingers, unsurprisingly, use the Clinton dodge -- he did it too! -- to justify Bush's commutation.

Clinton remains the favorite scapegoat for Republicans in trouble. Specifically, Tim Noah of slate.com argues that Libby's trial was "unfair".

"No fair-minded person can deny that the previous president committed perjury about Monica Lewinsky while serving in the Oval Office," Noah writes. "The country knew it, and it let him get away with it ... Is it really fair to treat White House aides more harshly than ordinary citizens when presidents get off scot-free?"

The question is: Did President Clinton really commit perjury? It is worth noting that lying under oath is not the same as perjury. Alex Koppelman of salon.com writes:

"The federal statute regarding perjury -- as well as many state statutes, but Clinton was testifying in a federal lawsuit, so that's the law that applies here -- requires that the lie be about something material to the case at hand. And the question of whether Clinton's lies were material to the case is by no means settled. Indeed, the judge in the case, Federal District Judge Susan Webber Wright, ruled that the Lewinsky issue was "not essential to the core issues" of the Jones lawsuit and excluded all evidence about Lewinsky from the suit."

Legal scholar Ronald Dworkin also has an answer:

"The case is somewhat stronger that Clinton committed perjury in his televised grand jury testimony when he insisted, contrary to Lewinsky's testimony, that he had not touched her breasts and genitals. The standard of materiality for a false statement before a grand jury is easier to meet than the standard for materiality in a civil action: a lie is material in the former context if the truth might have influenced the grand jury's decision whether to indict someone for a crime. But the only evidence ... that Clinton's grand jury statement was false is Lewinsky's contrary description of their sexual activities, and Posner himself reports that Lewinsky lied to her friends on several occasions about the details of these activities ... Posner chooses to believe Lewinsky in this instance, and he may be right to do so, but once again his claim of proof beyond a reasonable doubt that Clinton lied seems strained."

Some might also argue that President Bush has not fully pardoned Scooter Libby, hence, we should not be outraged. There are two problems with that argument.

First, President Bush refuses to rule out a pardon for Lewis Scooter Libby. The Associated Press reports:

President Bush on Tuesday refused to rule out an eventual pardon for I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, leaving open the chance he may wipe away the former White House aide's criminal record after already erasing his prison sentence.

Secondly, while it does not have anything to do with the Plame case, it is untrue that Scooter Libby is not that important in the Bush Administration. He has long been one of the most well-connected neoconservatives in the country. Along with Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Jeb Bush and Norman Podhoretz, Libby was one of the 25 signatories to the founding statement of Bill Kristol's empire-embracing Project for a New American Century in 1997. PNAC called for an invasion of Iraq long before the 9/11 attack was seized on as the "justification" for that invasion. When it comes to the political movement that has dominated the American government for the last six years, Scooter Libby was at its very crux, a close intimate of America's most powerful political officials.

Whether Bush grants Scooter Libby a pardon remains to be seen, but the Bush Administration has, once again, proven that "justice" is just a pretty word that does not have any significance.